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Introduction
Students. Studies. Essays. Teachers. Assessment. Each can be different.
Students have various attitude to the corrected essay: Some see only their grades and do not care about the adjustment, while others learn from the corrections. I wanted to find out how English majors at JPU in Pécs relate to their teachers' feedback, whether they found them valuable, something worth looking at, or an absolute waste of time. Thus I did this research in the fall semester of 1998. For this I read an article on the topic from Peter Grundy and Vivian Li and collected information from students

Method

I administered questionnaires to 18 first-year and five second -year JPU English majors. I asked nine questions in Hungarian and the students had to answer in Hungarian as well. Most of them were yes-no types, but they had to value some statements with numbers from one to seven in three questions. I asked them about the sorts of corrected mistakes from which they can learn the best, about how important the teacher's opinion was, how they described a well corrected essay, if talking through the assessment with the teacher was important, how the content and the grammatical mistakes influenced the given mark, whether they cared about the comments at all.

Results and Discussion

Firstly I asked them if they gave their take-home essays to their classmates for reading and telling their opinions about it. Surprisingly, none of the second-year students gave their essays to fellows and only four first -year majors did from the asked 18.

The second question was: Do you read through the corrected mistakes and the teacher's opinion on your essay? Everyone answered yes both parts of the question. My aim with this question was to find out if those teachers are right who claim that it is no worth correcting at all, because learners do not even read through the comments and corrections, they care about only the grade.

Then I was interested in how important the students thought it was that the teacher corrected the grammatical mistakes and the word usage beside the content. They valued it in a one to seven scale: Eight first-year and two second-year students gave the maximum score. And the lowest grade that two first-year and one second-year majors gave was four. (See Table 1)

Table 1: How relevant it is that the teacher correct the grammatical and word usage mistakes besides the content?

As the fourth question I wanted to know whether the students learnt from their mistakes, and I listed the following four sorts of them to find out which type was the best to learn from. Each majors, except one learnt from the corrected mistakes. Most of the first-year undergraduates (15) found the adjusted word usage mistakes the most useful. The corrected grammatical mistakes came out as the second. Eleven of them voted for the rectified spelling and the redressed text outlook as well. From the second-year students each of them marked the corrected spelling mistakes as a type they could learn from. Four of them found important the regulated grammatical, three of them the word usage and only one the amended layout.

I also asked how relevant it was that the teacher marked the type of the mistake (e.g. SP referred to the spelling mistakes). All of the second-year and most (16) of the first-year undergraduates claimed that it was significant.

These English majors reported that teacher's opinion on the returned essay was considerable. "It also helps students to develop editing and rewriting skills, particularly when they need to make substantial changes to the order of their material" (Grundy and Li 11). Only one first-year and one second-year student claimed that it was needless.

My last sizing-up question was: How much do you think, your grammatical mistakes and solecisms influenced the given mark on your essay and how influential the content was?

The second table shows that 12 students gave low grades-between one and four-for the first part of the question about the influence of solecisms and grammatical mistakes and only one major gave the maximum score.

Table 2

From the third table it turns out clearly that most of the undergraduates found the content more influential in the given mark. Sixteen of the asked twenty-three students gave the two highest grades-six and seven-for the second part of the question and only one scored bellow three. When I compared the results of the second and third tables, it revealed that the majors found the mark they got from the teachers related rather on the learnt topic than on writing mistakes.

Table 3.

From the answers to the eighth question it appeared that six first-year undergraduates thought that talking through the corrected essay with the teacher was insignificant. Six from the asked first-year students passed the talking through for important, but the rest (6) of them wrote that it depended on certain things: understanding the corrections or not (for two students), how unfair she thought the mark was(for one student), teacher's personality and sincerity (for two students) and one made it dependent on every of these listed things. Only one second-year major found talking through the assessment not relevant. Three of the five students were positive about its importance, and one would find it valuable, but she wrote: "Igen (fontos, hogy átbeszéljem hibáimata tanárral), illetve fontos lenne, deaz ember sokszor nem meri." (Yes, it is important to talk the mistakes through with the teacher, or it would be important we often do not dare to)

Students listed the characteristics of a well corrected essay in the last point of my questionnaire. Most of the majors (8) wrote that all sorts of mistakes (either in the content or in grammar and in stylistics) should be amended, furthermore, the teacher's opinion should appear on a well redressed essay.

Seven of the asked undergraduates signed the clear correction as one of the main features of the valuable assessment. Five found it notable that the teacher explained the redressed mistakes.

Four students listed the objective correction, three the actual marking as important aspects of a well corrected essay.

Twelve of the students referred that they lacked the positive feedback. Three of them added that a well rectified essay was on which the good parts were indicated too so they could use them in further essays. Five claimed that on a good assessment there must be positive comments as well to get encouragement from. Four undergraduates remarked that a good teacher should value the student's present performance in the assessment considering his or her previous accomplishment.

One of the asked students wrote that an essay is well corrected when the teacher-student relationship does not influence the given mark.

Conclusion

Feedback is important. Students can learn from it, and they consider the teacher's comments valuable. No matter that some teachers found it as a waste of time: "As teachers,... we know that the considerable amount of time we spend on correction is not productively employed" (Grundy and Li 8).

I learned it is. Most students learnt from the redressed mistakes and found the teacher's opinion on the essay relevant. Most of them claimed that it was important that the mistakes of language were corrected and marked too.

For me it was useful to do this research. In the future I hope I can use these results in practice, while I am planning to be a teacher also. I learnt what sorts of corrected mistakes students can learn from and how important the personal opinion and encouragement is for them. I hope others can also find something valuable in this little research, as well as I could.
I think it is a field with huge amount of further research opportunities. I think there should be more research on what kind of corrections students can learn from the best and what are the most effective assessment types. Learning from feedback can be a part of language learning.